The plan for a massive rezoning of midtown east, which stalled in the waning weeks of the Bloomberg administration, will get a new lease on life next month. That is when Mayor Bill de Blasio will release his timeline for reinvigorating the effort, according to Alicia Glen, the deputy mayor for economic development and housing. In fact, speaking at a breakfast forum hosted by the Citizens Budget Commission on Wednesday, she revealed that the administration would release its timeline in about two weeks.

The project as initially proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg aimed to rezone a more-than-70-block swath of midtown east to spur the construction of a new generation of bigger, state-of-the-art skyscrapers. By the sale of air rights that would allow developers to do just that, the city could, in turn, raise hundreds of millions of dollars for transit improvements in the area.

It's unclear how the de Blasio administration's plan will differ from his predecessor's proposal. The City Council and some preservationists and transportation advocates objected to that earlier plan. Among other things they said that the plan underpriced the air rights to be sold.

Ms. Glen said the administration would release its timeline in the "next week or two," but in a scrum with reporters after the event, she said the zoning would not take effect until 2016 at the earliest.

"That would mean we would obviously have the time to do all the work around consensus building on exactly how we should approach it, then get it certified," she said. "In real life, it's going to be between a year or two before you see anything happen."

She added, "It's not the number one thing we're working on right now, but we're going announce a process which will then give you a timeframe in which it will actually happen."

Asked how Mr. de Blasio's approach to the rezoning will differ from Mr. Bloomberg's, Ms. Glen said, "We want to make sure we do it in a way makes clear the infrastructure can be paid for in the sequence of events when you actually need the infrastructure to come online."

The subway would need to be able to service the projected growth in the number of commercial and residential tenants that would arrive as a result of the rezoning, she said. And paying for those upgrades in a way that "doesn't put additional burden on the city" needs to be planned out.

She declined to comment on the notion put forward by critics of the Bloomberg plan that air rights were being undervalued, but suggested that the city would seek to raise enough money in time to pay for upgrades to the area as quickly as possible.

"We want to look at a way where we can raise enough capital up front," Ms. Glen said. "It takes a long time to do those infrastructure improvements, so you really need to identify a source of financing up front."

When Mr. Bloomberg's plan died, SL Green Realty's plan to build a 65-story, 1.3 million-square-foot-office tower One Vanderbilt adjacent to Grand Central Station also ended. Asked if she saw One Vanderbilt as part of the overall rezoning, Ms. Glen said she has had "a lot of discussions" with Councilman Dan Garodnick, who represents the area, about the project.

"It's an incredibly exciting project," she said. "And it's a project that they've already identified a very high quality tenant that we would like to see come to New York."

Asked if that building could go forward independently of the Midtown east rezoning plan, Ms. Glen said, "I couldn't possibly comment."

On another matter she noted that the plan would not include much in the way of housing. "That is not a place where we're going to be concentrating our housing efforts."

With regard to housing, however, Ms. Glen revealed that the City Planning Commission would release by August or September an analysis of which neighborhoods the administration will concentrate its rezoning efforts on to support Mr. de Blasio's plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. That process will include a plan to mandate the inclusion of below-market rate units in any development benefiting from a rezoning, also called mandatory inclusionary zoning.

That report will likely call for 12 to 15 neighborhoods to be rezoned, among them in East New York, a neighborhood Ms. Glen said is "very underbuilt."

During the forum, Ms. Glen also said the city would commit $350 million in its five-year capital plan for infrastructure improvements in Hunter's Point South in Long Island City, Stapleton in Staten Island, and Coney Island—three neighborhoods she said have "amazing housing potential."

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